On October 18, 1954, the first transistor radio appeared on the market. Transistors were a big breakthrough in electronics — a new way to amplify signals. They replaced vacuum tubes, which were fragile, slow to warm up, and unreliable. During World War II, there was a big funding push to try to update vacuum tubes,…
Read more
Samsung, The Consumer Electronics Colossus
Until twenty years ago, Samsung was virtually unknown outside Korea. The firm, the largest of Korea's family-founded and run conglomerates called "Chaebols," the cornerstone of the original government-private axis on which modern South Korea emerged as a powerful economy following Japan's colonial domination, was founded in 1938 as a trading company. In the late 1960's it entered…
Read more